News & Views

Through the DCI Lens: A Two-Year Analysis of Lead Generation

April 8, 2016

DCI’s lead generation team recently reviewed client meeting data from 2014 and 2015 to see if any lead generation trends had emerged pertaining to the executives, geography and/or industries commonly targeted within the field. Admittedly, the analysis is somewhat skewed, as it represents the priorities of our clients during that time—a group that spans from Bavaria, Costa Rica and Tuscany to McKinney, TX, Minneapolis-Saint Paul and Prince William County, VA.

That said, our specialization in targeting North American companies for recruitment allowed us to take a hard look at a concentrated geographic dataset, which revealed several striking insights:

Company Size: Most statistics over the years have shown that a majority of job growth comes from small, growing companies. Our analysis would support this—the largest group represented was 1-99 employees, sometimes deemed too small to target by EDOs and IPAs, but which represented 39% of our meeting total. A full 60% of the companies had less than 500 employees, considered by many to be the cutoff for SMEs. Surprising, the 500-999 group was under-represented, perhaps signifying a focus by that subset of filling existing capacity and acquiring new customers.

Leadership Role: We dissected who met with our clients as a result of our qualified appointments, designating executives according to various functions based on their titles. Across all companies, after the Chief Executive, there was broad diversity among the other roles, from HR to legal to technology. That shocked us, especially with legal executives neck-and-neck alongside finance! HR’s equality with Real Estate also stood out. A deeper dive revealed that, among VP-level executives, there was the strongest concentration in human resources, legal, operations and finance, above others.

Decision-Maker Level: The correlation between an executive who hosts a meeting and the company’s size is quite strong. There seemed to be a very distinct cut-off at the 600 employee level—C-level executives were the most common meeting-takers below that mark; almost non-existent in initial meetings above it. VPs trended higher than that—beginning around 100 employees and extending into five-digit territory.

Enjoy the data dump with this lead generation trend infographic:

Which discovery do you find the most compelling? Share your comments below or on Twitter @aboutdci.

Steve Duncan

Steve Duncan is Vice President of DCI’s lead generation division. Since 2004, Steve has managed marketing programs for a diverse set of city, state and country organizations, from Albuquerque and Houston to Tuscany and Wyoming.